The Vice Chancellor of Plateau State University, Bokkos, Prof. Yohanna Izam, says the institution has commenced payment of earned allowances to its staff whose claims have been verified.Izam disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Bokkos.NAN reports that the Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the university comprising Non Academic Staff Union (NASU) and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) had on July 25 embarked on strike over the earned allowances.“The process has commenced; we have gotten the critical endorsement of the Governing Council to implement these allowances for the staff.“We have gone ahead to request staff to make submissions about claims that will be verified.“The process of verification has been on, as a matter of fact, the management has made commitment to staff of the university across the unions to commence implementation.“The list of staff and the verified amount due to them as per the template that is relevant to us here has been submitted to all the unions.“Some of the unions that have verified their claims have responded back to the management.“As we speak today, we have already approved their payment and those unions whose claims have been verified have started getting their payments,” he said.He said university’s management had observed that there were some few cases of computational errors, omissions and etc, on verified unions.The vice chancellor, however, assured that since the implementation is a process, the university would continue with the payment of the verified figures while those with issues would be taken care of subsequently.He wondered why the unions leaders who were fully aware of the processes could still declare a strike without informing their members of the development.“I don’t know where the story of non implementation is coming from, because as at he time the JAC called for the industrial action, we had already given the names to unions.“This include those who went to the meeting and did not show their members the verified list and on the basis of that a strike action has been called,” he stated.Izam said that in spite of the strike, lectures were still going on as the academic staff and the students were attending classes just like the technologists who were in the laboratories.According to him, some senior staff who did not respond to call by a section of the leadership of union were working while some who are now aware of the development were back to work.He said the management had met with all the four staff unions including the faction of the JAC that is on strike.He said that the management appealed to those on strike to immediately return to work so that proper processes of discussions would be allowed to continue on any areas that were grey.“During the meeting, it became clear to us that part of the problem was inadequacy of information as proper information was not supplied to the vast majority of members of the unions.“At that point we felt that we needed to close that gap in terms of open door accessibility, availability and supply of information to entire staff of the university,” he added. (NAN)
